Social Media Goes Wild After Odor Punched Bautista

The bad blood that has been building for months between the Blue Jays and Rangers erupted. The Rangers finally responded to Bautista’s infamous bat flip from last year’s American League Division Series, resulting in Bautista getting punched in the face and a massive bench-clearing brawl.

Everything seemed fine until the eighth inning, when right-hander Matt Bush hit Bautista with a pitch and everything escalated from there. Two batters later, Bautista came into the base with a hard slide that was ruled a violation of MLB’s new slide rule and made contact with second baseman Rougned Odor’s leg. Odor responded with Odor by punching bautista and that sparked a huge bench-clearing brawl between the bitter rivals.

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There have been thousands of slides at second base in major-league baseball history that were more dangerous and reckless than Bautista’s takeout at second base of the Rangers’ Odor on Sunday afternoon.

“I was pretty surprised,” said Bautista, who was staggered but did not go down. “I mean, obviously, that’s the only reason that he got me and he got me pretty good, so I have to give him that. It takes a little bit bigger man to knock me down.”

“It shows at least the apparent lack of leadership they have over there when it comes to playing baseball the right way. Baseball plays are supposed to be taken care of by baseball plays. I thought it was pretty cowardly of them to wait until my last at-bat to do that, in the whole series. They could have come out and done it if they just wanted to kind of send a message.”

Bautista and Odor were ejected along with Toronto’s Josh Donaldson and Texas bench coach Steve Buechele.

GM John Gibbons, who was ejected earlier in the game, had this to say:

“It was ugly and unfortunate,” Gibbons said. “To me, it was gutless. The other 29 teams, they come at you right away, but to wait until the end, it just sort of tells you something. Everybody is going to say, `Oh, it was a one-run game. The ball got away.’ That ain’t going to fly.”

Odor was not available to reporters after the game.

Of course lots weighed in on social media, here are some of the tweets as well as a few of the inevitable photoshops:

What a cheap shot on batista by odor..batista should break that punk in half.he should beat his ass prison style..week sucker punch